Syne said:
Now on to the Southern Strategy. Please explain, in your own words and understanding, what occurred, how it was done, and the timeline over which it occurred. If you are intellectually honest, you will at least give me an honest basis for discussing the facts with you. And before you try to demand anything of me, remember, you are the one who brought up, and made assertions about, the Southern Strategy.
I think part of the question here is whether you are ignorant of this part of American history or just trolling. True, that is an unfortunate question, but also one that has relevance, since this thread is an offshoot of others in which a pretense of historical ignorance is key to supporting diverse theses postulated in defense of bigotry.
The Southern Strategy is an invention of Lee Atwater, longtime Republican operative:
"You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968 you can't say 'nigger'—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states' rights, and all that stuff, and you're getting so abstract. Now, you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… 'We want to cut this,' is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than 'Nigger, nigger.'"
Rick Perlstein↱ considered the notorious 1981 remarks in 2012:
The back-story goes like this. In 1981, Atwater, after a decade as South Carolina's most effective Republican operative, was working in Ronald Reagan's White House when he was interviewed by Alexander Lamis, a political scientist at Case Western Reserve University. Lamis published the interview without using Atwater's name in his 1984 book The Two-Party South. Fifteen years later—and eight years after Atwater passed away from cancer—Lamis republished the interview in another book using Atwater’s name. For seven years no one paid much attention. Then the New York Times' Bob Herbert, a bit of an Atwater obsessive, quoted it in an October 6, 2005 column—then five more times over the next four years.
Those words soon became legend—quoted in both screeds (The GOP-Haters Handbook, 2007) and scholarship (Corey Robin's 2011 classic work of political theory, The Reactionary Mind). Google Books records its use in ten books published so far this year alone. Curious about the remarks' context, Carter, who learned Lamis had died in 2012, asked his widow if she would consider releasing the audio of the interview, especially in light of the use of race-baiting dog-whistles (lies about Obama ending work requirements for welfare; "jokes" about his supposed Kenyan provenance) in the Romney presidential campaign. Renée Lamis, an Obama donor, agreed that very same night. For one thing she was “upset,” Carter told me, that “for some time, conservatives believed [her] husband made up the Atwater interview.” For another, she was eager to illustrate that her husband's use of the Atwater quote was scholarly, not political.
The Southern Strategy thus dates at least to 1981, but was clearly functioning to some degree at that time; part of its validation looks to Strom Thurmond's 1978 campaign, which "won 38 percent of South Carolina's middle-class black vote":
“That voter, in my judgment,” [Atwater] claims, “will be more likely to vote his economic interests than he will anything else. And that is the voter that I think through a fairly slow but very steady process, will go Republican.” Because race no longer matters: “In my judgment Karl Marx [is right]… the real issues ultimately will be the economic issues.” He continues, in words that uncannily echo the “47 percent tape” (nothing new under the wingnut sun), that “statistically, as the number of non-producers in the system moves toward fifty percent,” the conservative coalition cannot but expand. Voila: a new Republican majority. Racism won't have anything to do with it.
Whatever manner of wishful thinking that was proved incorrect; prejudice and bigotry still thrive in the South, and dark skin is still among the favorite targets.
In 1980, Ronald Reagan's presidential campaign mobilized a large evangelical bloc of unstable voters who tended to stay home when they perceived their choices being devilish; in subsequent years they have generally chosen the devils they know, but are increasingly dissatisfied with voting for devils. The evangelical bloc is key to the Southern Strategy; without them, the whole thing collapses.
The short-term result would say the Reagan campaign pulled off a marvelous feat. The longer-term historical assessment would put that maneuver at the heart of perceived societal dysfunction; this bloc has everything to do with the current condition of the GOP.
For the last thirty-five years, the evangelical conservative bloc has driven the right-wing backlash against women, racial and ethnic minorities, gays, and non-Christians.
The policies have been evident; our Drug War is an excellent example. In the nineties, with white users making up nearly two-thirds of crack users, federal prosecutions for possession of crack cocaine focused almost exclusively on blacks. There are those who will claim to have never heard of what happened in
Tulia, Texas↗, but there's nothing like sweeping up over a sixth of your town's black population in order to prosecute them on the basis of uncorroborated testimony from a white, crack-smoking cop with a history of criminal activity.
The Drug War is, in fact, among the most successful manifestations of the Southern Strategy; at its height we achieved an infamous statistic of thirds:
One-third of black males born will not live to see their eighteenth birthday; one-third of those who remain will be in the penal system before their thirtieth. The Drug War plainly preferred white people, sparing them its greatest wrath.
But the Southern Strategy has also largely run its course; witness the response to #BlackLivesMatter. The #AllLivesMatter counterpoint is exceptionally and obviously racist in its context; consider that society is supposed to freak out about white evangelicals losing their authority over women and gay peple, because this is apparently a problem, but when the question is blacks being slain by zealous cops we are supposed to look away from the problem. Because it's true, when it comes to civil liberties, #AllRightsMatter, too, but these bigots are openly hostile to other people's human rights and civil liberties. There is no real point to #AllRightsMatter, because the intended audience doesn't believe that. #AllLivesMatter? Well, sure, but there is also a
specific problem leading to #BlackLivesMatter. The #AllLivesMatter counterpoint is nothing more than a microiteration of the Southern Strategy in which the racist goal is subsumed under more general rhetoric. The problem of police brutality and privilege is hardly new, and shows incredibly disparate impact aganist blacks and the black community, but apparently dealing with this specific question is unfair to white people.
When you watch conservative political arguments pretend ignorance of history, this is part of the latter-day Southern Strategy; once upon a time, empowerment majorities perched comfortably on pedestals. The idea of the Southern Strategy was a nod and wink; now that the historical narratives are imploding, the holdouts have no choice but to start all over, and pretend history never existed.
And in between Atwater and today, we've seen strong backlash against community recovery. Through the nineties and into the new century the appeal to basic economic interest turned to assertions of rights and equality, and we witnessed an upwelling of sentiments about oppressors as victims; remember that for the empowered factions,
equality was
mere equality. Arguments about school funding, for instance, were couched in a weird sentiment in which the conservative conceded history, but would only go forward if we declared institutional inequality as the new equality so that the empowered classes need not give up any privilege; thus, we would all be equal, but only as long as that equality preserved inequality. Functionally, a city or county or state could not increase funding to lagging, minority populated schools in order to bring them up to par without also setting a new par for more affluent, largely-white schools.
Rick Perry's awful gaffe, describing the Mother Emanuel massacre as an "accident", is symptomatic of a larger question about the Southern Strategy, which is the same notion that couches the question of the Confederate flag in such bizarre terms. The paradox is apparent:
A dearth of supremacism equals countersupremacism; one cannot be equal unless one is superior.
It is a common conservative paradox that is especially apparent in the Confederate flag debate. And the library debate. And the health care access debate. And human rights debates. The Southern Strategy and its devices are powerfully apparent as they continue to haunt us from beyond Lee Atwater's grave.
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Notes:
Perlstein, Rick. "Exclusive: Lee Atwater's Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy". The Nation. 13 November 2012. TheNation.com. 2 January 2016. http://bit.ly/1RWUv1B
Crime rate has noting to do with the fact that Democrats have for more than a century been the party of social justice and civil rights. Just because the Democratic Party was formed/organized when slavery was the norm and an accepted and legal practice, it doesn't mean the modern Democratic Party is the party of racial oppression, because history clearly shows it isn't.